Slow It Down Now

It's been a long time since I've stepped foot in Italy.  A little over ten years, in fact.  The last time I was there, I was a junior in high school on a bus trip that was carting 50-something students through Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland at breakneck speeds over the course of ten days.  We spent a day in Venice and a morning in Verona.  And that was it for Italy.  The whole thing was a blur.

A scene in Venice

I learned that spring that I don't like bus trips.  A decade later, a lot of the memories from that trip have smushed together.  I am so grateful that I was able to see the sites I did, but part of me now wishes that we had gone to half the places for double the amount of time.  I feel like you don't get as much out of traveling by trying to cover as much ground as possible just to earn bragging rights.  You end up spending 30 seconds at a place where you should spend 30 minutes and, in my opinion, are robbed of the full experience.

On the other hand, trying to deal with that many bored teenagers sounds like a nightmare, so maybe it's a good thing that we didn't do that.

Verona's Colosseum

But I'm not a teenager anymore (thank god) and so much for "shoulda, woulda, coulda."  It has taken me a while to arrive at this slow travel conclusion, and I've decided to take what I have learned from the past and apply it to the future.

This summer, a good friend of mine from college is getting married in Naples.  Mike and I are both super excited to be going and have decided to plan a trip around it.  At first, I was trying to see how many places we could squeeze in during our two weeks in Europe, but then it hit me like a ton of bricks.  Why would we want to rush through Italy?  It's not like there is a dearth of things to explore and experience there.   I realize that not everyone has the luxury of slowly meandering through a place when on vacation, but I still firmly believe in quality over quantity and wanted that to be the theme of this trip.

I'm excited that we're going to take it slow this time in Italy.  We're doing a week in Rome and a week in Naples.  Who knows when you will end up back in a place, so you might as well soak it all in and enjoy it to the fullest extent.